


Changing of the Guard

by Menzosarres



Category: House of Cards (US TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2018-11-22 14:58:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11382555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menzosarres/pseuds/Menzosarres
Summary: When it comes to the presidency, Claire doesn't want to repeat any of her husband's mistakes. When it comes to forming attachments, she doesn't want to repeat any of her own.But a West Wing crowded with strangers and a Residence crowded with silence isn't easy on anyone's sanity, and Claire never asked to be left alone at the top.





	1. A Chapter Without Jane

**Author's Note:**

> So. Hi. Me again. This took a while. And I haven't written in a while. And I've never been a present-tense kind of person but either something about this show just screams 'present tense' or I was too inspired by elainebarrish's take to consider doing it differently. Put all that together and who knows what this mess will look like by the time I finish chapter 6, but I think if I don't throw the first half out there now, I never will. 
> 
> General feeling: this ended up being more about me trying to write something, anything, really, and less than it should have been about this fascinating, compelling ship, but maybe I'll come back to them when I'm less scattered, busy, and out of practice.

Francis calls every day that week. Once a day, at 9:45 PM, like clockwork.

Every time Claire declines the call, the White House seems a little smaller, the distance between her world and his growing, cavernous and silent, full of everything else he may have been hiding from her while they shared this roof and everything he’s doing now, out there, somewhere she can’t see.

On the second week, he doesn’t call until Friday. She considers it, only for a moment. It’s been a week from hell, full of familiar faces she knows she can’t trust and new faces she doesn’t know at all and a war on top of everything, and really, she doesn’t mind being alone, but she’s never alone, and if she can’t be alone, she’d rather be watched with someone who understands beside her.

She knows Francis wouldn’t make it difficult. If she picked up the phone, it would be a calm conversation—no pleasantries, but an exchange of that easy understanding that has existed between them for twenty-eight years wrapped up in the next steps he would be sure they’d have to take to come out of this on top.

But everything is different now. Now, Claire knows Francis’s greatest flaw. They’ve discussed it before, the importance of their particular honesty, their willingness to admit to each other the darkest depths of their ambition and pride, to recognize the people around them they can share that candor with, with whom they can put aside games. They watch too many people with smaller ambitions try to pretend their darkest drives don’t exist, and watch them fail because of it. There is value in truth—selective honesty, with most, but with each other, complete.

If they don’t say it aloud to someone, it eats holes in them until everyone around them can see it, dark as night and clear as day.

And Francis lied. Not about the little things, his little coup, but about all they’d worked for together. He never admitted it, not to her, not to anyone, but his every move this past year had chewed through his tired skin and gnawed the seams of his best suits until even she had to admit what so many around her had said for years: Francis believes, on top, there is only room for one.

That is the kind of secret that ends a marriage.

So she stepped up, and watched him fall.

But now, as the phone vibrates on top of that Resolute oak that grew in a time when Apple was still just fruit and children’s rhymes, Claire doesn’t want to make the same mistake. Standing alone at the top is a balancing act no mere man—woman—can maintain forever. With things as they are, it would take no great skill and very little luck to be the person who drags her down. Francis threw enough of the allies who’d been at their backs for decades to the wolves waiting for his throat, that soon there was no one left to lift so much as a finger to steady him as he stumbled, no one to catch him as he plummeted towards the hungry mouths below, unsated by the meager, spineless sheep he threw to them before.

The screen light dims, and the room falls silent again.

Claire sighs, staring at the papers in front of her she knows are waiting for her signature, but which she’s already forgotten the subject of. She flips her phone face-down, not wanting to see the taunting white text.

_Francis Underwood_  
_Missed Call_

It’s all for the best. Francis isn’t a steadying hand any longer, but she doesn’t intend to stand alone here forever. She needs new balance.

But in an empty office at the end of a very full day, Claire feels absence gnawing at her, the first warning of encroaching wolves. Francis is gone. Doug is gone. LeAnn, Seth, Cathy—gone. All people she understood, some more easily than others, and all people who understood her, some to a greater extent than others, and all… gone, some more permanently than others. And so she is watched, alone, tempted to talk to herself more often than she’d care to admit. Francis had grown to like it too much, preaching to eyes and ears and gaping mouths that couldn’t talk back. She feels… untethered, without an understanding ear to serve as her mirror, her confessional. To return what those who watch merely take.

And Tom is gone, but Tom was never that person. Tom was always… difficult. She looked for something in him she was never going to find, the latest in a string of these men—artistic, needy, still clinging to a fleeting sense of their own youth—everything Francis wasn’t. But she never wanted any of that, and what she did want, what she stole from them… It wasn’t Tom she wanted it from. With Francis, she always knew her necessity. He never stopped needing her, no matter how large and distant he grew. He needed her, yes, but did he want her? As the years passed, she believed it less and less. With Tom, Adam… Oh, they wanted her. Perhaps they even needed her. But they didn’t understand her. And being watched as she talked and slept with someone who never quite listened when she tried to make him understand… Over time, he became just another pair of eyes, wanting, weighing.

Claire has always been ambivalent about attention. And she could only convince herself she wanted him back for so long.

She picks up her pen, beginning to sign with an intention she doesn’t feel, too tangled in her own thoughts to reread the permissions and grants and addendums waiting for her name.

Because then, of course, there’s Jane. Waiting on the tale end of every thought about her presidency. Had she known, when she set her part in motion, that Jane wouldn’t be beside her…

Well, it doesn’t do to dwell on might have beens.

Jane is in Dubai, doing what she does, a week’s worth of her particular brand of astonishing sanity filtered through one brief phone call and an equally brief update from Usher, who she still doesn’t quite trust and still doesn’t think of by his first name, despite everything she has made him do for her. Since Francis stepped down, Jane’s sheer competence seems to have doubled, tripled, no longer hampered by their shared agenda Claire was never willing to openly discuss. Which makes Claire wonder, more often than she might like, just how far Jane Davis’s successes under the last president had been slowed by, as Jane had insisted with such sincerity, Claire’s distracting presence, and how much had simply been Jane, carefully preparing for what Claire had wanted but always denied aloud, refusing to pull her impossible strings until he was out of the way, and she was in power.

Claire flips her phone up again, swiping the missed call off the screen before she unlocks it.

She wonders what it says about her—about this week, this day—that Jane’s name in her contacts feels even more tempting than Francis’s call. She hovers over it, contemplating reason, both her stunning lack of it, in the broadest sense, and whether she can come up with one compelling enough to excuse the unforgivable sin of wanting to talk to someone who makes her feel…

The phone rings. She drops it. It clatters off the edge of the desk and onto the floor, its buzz now muffled and low. Claire takes a moment to gather herself, to push back her chair and close her eyes, breathing out a quick sigh.

It really is too quiet in this place.

She looks down, expecting Francis, but no, he hasn’t called twice since the day of the press conference.

Instead, she feels something squeeze in her chest as she reaches down with an unexpected, haunted smile.

“Jane,” she says, putting the phone to her ear. “How is Dubai.”


	2. A Chapter Without Knowing

When Francis calls on Friday of the third week, Jane is there.

It's an unexpected surprise. Mark Usher brings her in after hours, a rare, intuitive gestures that, if repeated often enough, could almost make Claire begin to like him. Not five minutes later, he's called away, and Jane, pristine despite travel, a little bit sun-kissed, steals his seat at her desk.

Claire lingers by the window. She's listening, weighing Jane's words on the world she has just returned from, the private response of leaders in the region to their thirty thousand troops, and her decision to drop by without warning. The call arrives in a moment's silence. It’s no matter that Claire doesn’t react as the phone buzzes between them—Jane misses nothing.

“Made a decision, have you?”

She hesitates, turning back towards the desk. “No—”

But as her finger descends on the red _decline_ , her dismissal falters. She has, hasn’t she? Francis may keep calling, neck-deep in denial and boyish rage, and Claire may not want to admit it aloud, but her decision has been made since the moment she didn’t pick up his first call. No, even before— _I’ll announce it tomorrow. A full and unconditional pardon for Francis Underwood_ —when she lied to him.

She meets Jane’s eyes, calmly awaiting her reply, then glances past them, daring those who watch to judge, heckle, and scorn. She knows too well the inclination to ally with him, in all his ineffective fury, over her, even at her best. And she knows even better their longing to be her only confidant, their glee at watching her grow more and more distant these past weeks, removed from everything and everyone beyond their small glimpse of her world. But someone else had offered to be her clarity, once. This time, Claire will hold her to it.

“I don’t want him dead.”

Denials are over. It has been three weeks. In that time, two cities have been destroyed, two hundred acres seared by the chemical stain of death, two thousand years of history erased. Enough with the distractions of men and those who watch them.

_My turn._

It’s time for a plan.

“But I need him gone.”

She takes her seat and rests her hands a few inches from Jane’s, pale and attentive, clasped on the other side of the desk.

Jane nods knowingly, understandingly. “There are other options.” 

“Are there?” She hears her own voice as though for the first time, delicate, as artfully calm as Jane’s but a bit higher, a bit more wanting, and a bit less believable for it. She wants Jane here, to solve this, to buffer against the dangers of isolation, but she can’t afford to have Jane around when they aren’t alone. She becomes too transparent by comparison.

“Of course. Though I wouldn’t recommend divorce, not yet. If you don’t want him out of the picture for good—”

“I know there has to be balance.”

Jane nods. “Too angry, too distancing, too sure he did something wrong, and you look blind, not to have noticed it for so long in your own home. Too ardent a defender—”

“I become complicit. I’m well aware. This isn’t my first scandal.”

When Jane smiles in understanding, she almost admits it would be easier if he were dead. She has the distinct impression that, given the slightest hint, the smallest nudge towards the part of her that longs for that permanent solution, Jane wouldn’t ask for explicit permission. She would simply… see it done.

It's the only thing Jane ever said to her that she didn’t quite believe, when she’d insisted she found Claire hard to read.

Her first two fingers rub circles against her thumb, counterclockwise, a restless motion she hasn’t indulged in for years. She doesn’t like to consider how little she would mind, how few tears she would shed for him, how she could even do it herself, were she any less sure Francis had something prepared, set in motion to drag her down with him as he fell into his grave. She doesn’t like to think he still has any ability to dictate her choices, but a few weeks of declined calls do not freedom make.

_Let freedom ring…_

“I was thinking of prison.”

Jane’s voice draws her back. “Excuse me?”

“I know, it’s gonna sound impossible—”

“Not impossible.” That strange quirk of hers—the casual slips of _gonna_ and _wanna_ that tease of old-fashioned Southern grace resting, at ease, beneath Jane’s quick-spoken, articulate exterior—gives Claire pause. Mentally, she shakes herself. It's one thing to romanticize companionship in nearly a month without genuine human interaction, but another thing entirely to underestimate the power and ambition that drives the often likable, sometimes haphazard, rarely kind creature that is Jane Davis, Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade.

The woman who has just suggested putting her husband behind bars.

“Not impossible at all. Not even difficult, considering the pace of last month’s impeachment.” She knows her frustration is poorly disguised. “But ill-advised.”

“Claire, hear me out.” Jane rests two fingers on the back of her hand, stalling the restless circles and stilling her tongue. “We already decided you wouldn't gain anything from impeachment. And Frank in an American prison would be nothing short of a catastrophe. He’s a liability just about anywhere he’d want to go, in any role, with any power. And with nothing left to lose, he’s worse. All that being said—”

Claire isn’t expecting it, Jane’s hand sliding beneath her own and flipping it over, settling them palm to palm, the first joint of Jane’s fingers resting, gentle and insistent, on the pulse at her wrist.

“—if he flees the country… Well. That’s another thing altogether.”

Her tongue feels heavy, unwieldy. She has the sudden urge to ask if they should be discussing this here, in this office, instead of in a dark stairwell, a deserted side room, but she started this conversation, and she can’t bring herself to voice hesitation, sensing she’s on the precipice of many tenuous things—the final severance from her other half, a glimpse of who and through whom Jane wields her incomprehensible, immeasurable power, and something else, something more personal than even the end of a marriage, something she’d bet Jane always starts with two fingers, like a tap on the shoulder, a curl tucked behind an ear, or a late night cigarette.

“I can arrange that,” Jane continues, Claire’s thoughts unaired, unheard. “It wouldn’t be the first time. To the world, it would look like he left willingly, running away from the justice he swore to execute, the people he promised to serve.” She gives Claire’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Then, you have options.”

“Would you send him to the Middle East?” she asks, glad her words still ring with nothing more than mild curiosity, light and composed as ever.

“I could.” Jane withdraws her hand, fingers gliding across the length of her palm, cool and dangerous. “But I was thinking of the Crimea.”

This time, though startled, Claire doesn’t say a word.

“Simpler and less conspicuous than Syria or Palestine— He’s in no greater danger there than anywhere else on this mess of a planet, and probably less. Some of my best resources are in the region.” She leans forward, loose curls swaying free of her shoulders, gleaming in the half-lit room like the beckoning glint of gold at the mouth of a dragon’s lair. “You could kill two birds with one stone.”

Claire shivers at the warm, intimate half-smile on this woman’s lips as she offers that fateful cliche. She sees it, then, the only way she ever does during her sessions with Jane—six segments of a plan, a half-dozen artfully chosen phrases, delicately reordered pieces, no more than necessary, falling into something brilliant, something spare and minimalist and critically effective, something that might let her keep this House for just a few more years. “Walk me through it.”

Jane’s smile sharpens. It’s the smile of a predator catching scent of blood on the wind, lethal and sure, and Claire can feel her pulse pick up, beating low and thick in her ears.

“Francis colludes with Russia to steal his election. Without your pardon, fearing arrest, he flees to Petrov. You’ve been suspicious for some time. After all, it was through your staff, through LeAnn Harvey, that you unraveled the first thread of his deceit and negotiated the return of Aiden McCallum, who was tragically murdered by Russian operatives for fear of what he knew about Francis.”

“We can’t use LeAnn—” Claire begins, but Jane holds up a hand.

“She isn’t dead, Claire. I thought you might need her.”

Not for the first time in this room with this woman, Claire feels a chill creep up her spine. She always makes it sound so simple, so straightforward, to circumvent her husband's will. 

“Anyway, all of that is information that fills in gaps for the public, paints you in a favorable light, and removes most of the potential for loose ends to bring up worse questions for you. In the mean time, Francis will be in an easy location to drop breadcrumbs—pictures, sightings, what have you—but in a place with enough chaos that Petrov will never get his hands on him. All while our dear Russian president will maintain his furious denial about the entire event, which, of course, no one here at home will believe. It's gonna drive him crazy, knowing Frank Underwood is practically in his backyard, and there's nothing he can do about it."

Reluctantly, a smile steals across Claire's lips.

"And you—” Jane brings her elbow to rest on the desk, supporting an outstretched palm. “—Madam President, will have removed the last traces of leverage Petrov had over you. You’ll have a ready-made excuse, the next time you tread… hmm…” Her fingers curl, as does one side of her lips. “…less than lightly in Russia’s domain. And—” Her hand relaxes again, open and extended.

Claire realizes it’s an invitation. Slowly, her hand rises to mirror it, and Jane clasps them together in a quick, tight squeeze.

“—he will be gone.”

_And he will be gone._

She takes a moment. Not to decide, not to consider, but to allow herself the grounding of this rare human contact, Jane’s hand in hers—so like a handshake, and nothing like one at all. There has been nothing but handshakes since Francis left. This feels different.

"You're certain you can do this?" she prompts. "He's still protected." 

"So was McCallum." 

Slowly, she nods. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Jane echoes.

Drawing back, disentangling their fingers, feeling thin and raw too small for a moment threatening this monumental a change in the course of the universe, Claire nods.

“Yes.” She doesn’t want to linger. She doesn’t want second thoughts. She asked for him to be gone, and Jane will see it done.

“Then I’ll get things started.”

Jane reaches for her bag, ready to leave, and Claire feels something not unlike panic grip her chest. “Wait.” She hesitates. She’s had three weeks to weigh this moment, and she isn’t sure when she’ll get another chance. “You asked me something, once. I brushed it off, and I think, now, I may have been wrong to do so.”

The bag stays on the floor. Jane’s eyebrows raise—innocent, inquisitive.

“You asked me who I wanted you to be.”

"Ahh." Jane smiles again, the gentle kind, the one that caught Claire off-guard in her kitchen, the very morning that question had first been asked. “And you said that was a bad answer.”

“I did. It was. But I see now it might have been a more important question than I knew.” She pauses, knowing she could fill this half-beat of silence with any number of apologies, for the times she brushed Jane aside, for the times she grew suspicious and fell back on Francis, for the times she was harsh, impatient, even cruel, but she knows, and she knows that Jane understands, she isn’t the sort to ask forgiveness. “I want you to be here.” She hates begging, she won’t do it, but she’s never been above calmly asking for what she wants. “Not in Dubai, not in Moscow. Here.”

“Claire—”

“You told me not to isolate myself. I want to do this without him, Jane.” She speaks, her tone serene, her face inscrutable, but she knows Jane will hear it, the part of her that would beg, in another house, in another time, with less eyes watching, weighing, waiting. “But I can’t do it on my own.”

“You have Mark. Give me two more weeks and you’ll have LeAnn, just as loyal as before. I can probably even get you Cathy.”

“It isn’t loyalty I want.”

Jane sighs. "Then I'm gonna ask you again." For the first time, Claire catches a glimpse of something _tired_ about her, a yearning, in the faint lines about her eyes, for a quieter, lesser world. "Who do you want me to be?”

And Claire still hates it, that question. There are too many wrong answers. She deserves to be secretary of state, but that would guarantee even more trips abroad, more press trailing her every move, less freedom. She could be an adviser, a credible expert, the chief of some ne’er-aforementioned department, but she was already the first, the second, and far more powerful than the third. She could be the new Adam, the new Tom, the new Francis, if Claire dared to imagine it for more than an unsubtle heartbeat picking up whenever pale, slender fingers redirected her attention to the woman who wielded a gentle touch more effectively than any of those men had ever wielded their art, their words, or their rage—but Claire, who is afraid of very little in this world, is afraid to imagine just that.

“I don’t know,” she admits, and the confession tastes foreign in her mouth. “I only know it can’t be two phone calls in as many weeks.”

Jane stares at her for a long time, searching her face in that strange, knowing way of hers. “Okay.” 

Claire blinks. “I—That’s it?”

She smiles, just a little sadly. “I serve at the pleasure of the president—”

“Jane…”

“—even when the president doesn’t know what she wants.”


	3. A Chapter Without Closure

True to her word, Jane stays. They have breakfasts again, not every day, but more than once in a week, and sometimes lunch as well, when Claire can take one that isn’t at her desk. Because Jane stays, but she keeps her distance in the White House. She’s a constant, ghostly presence at the periphery of everything that happens around Claire. Not always in the room, but easy to account for afterwards, lingering in the hallway in deep conversation with the generals, or deeper, utterly incomprehensible conversation with ambassadors and visiting heads of state. Claire realizes quickly she’s had very few of those meetings herself, but she allows it, silently grateful to have smaller problems peeled away and managed before they reach her, mired as she is in a foreign war and an endless crisis of Underwood scandal.

But Claire watches her, watches until it’s an unacceptable distraction, really. Until it’s almost painful. Jane carries an incredible stillness with her, half listening, half command. She stands, square, heels just apart below loose, tucked-waist skirts and one-toned, flawlessly cut blouses, and everything around her seems to rest, settled and silent, cowed of any inclination to creak or rustle or hum. Men orbit her like they want something, their posture open and inviting, but she rarely reaches out, and they only cross that invisible barrier that surrounds her to shake hands or exchange papers. It’s different with women. Jane touches them, gently, and without prompting, a hand on a shoulder to gain someone’s attention, a touch on the arm to offer understanding.

Claire watches until she knows Jane looks up in exasperation, down when she sighs. And unlike Francis, she never, ever tries to put words in Claire's mouth.

She realizes, as days and weeks begin to creep into the start of summer, that Jane hasn’t been in the Oval since they quietly discussed her husband’s disposal, and the Friday calls still come. Breakfasts are always rushed, consumed by talk of soldiers and assets, ploys and strategies. It’s difficult to pull back from counting the cost, both in the capitalist sense, and the moral one, to spend time with her as anything more than allies.

She misses something she’s not sure she’s ever had—she hates missing it—a treat that has been dangled in front of her eyes and stolen before she could even taste it.

Isn’t she the president? Isn’t she supposed to have everything, now? All she ever wanted?

“Invite me to dinner this week.”

As though summoned by her thoughts, Claire looks up from her portfolio and finds Jane over the rim of her glasses. She’s just through the doorway, barely into the office, looking timeless and sylvan in a darker green than Claire is used to seeing on her slim frame. 

“Okay.” It doesn’t need to be a question for Jane to know she's waiting for an explanation.

“Things are moving forward, and we need more than a… a half hour to talk. Without interruptions.”

Claire shuts the folder. “Tomorrow then?”

“Yes. I’ll come up with you after your meeting with Oshiro.”

“Any dinner requests?” she asks, the question slipping into the air before she realizes what she’s doing—trying to draw out even this insignificant moment for as long as she can, sick of quick exchanges of practical words. Dinner tomorrow seems remarkably far away, and that should worry her—does worry her, but not enough to stop her.

Jane smiles. “Oh, you know me. Nothing impressive.” Her phone buzzes and she reaches into her bag, but looks up before retrieving it. “Good food is almost… inconsequential, as long as you have good company.”

Phone in hand, she leaves with a quiet, "Excuse me." 

Claire wishes, to a startling degree, that she could follow.

###

Friday passes like a sedative. Her meeting with Oshiro drags well past it’s scheduled hour, and when her aide appears with the schedule for tomorrow, Claire dismisses her more curtly than she deserves. She wants this day finished.

Despite the delay, Jane seems perfectly content when Claire finds her seated in the waiting room. She’s in blue today—loose, flattering lines that flow down her body from shoulders to thighs like summer dripping rain.

She rises with a smile. “Shall we?”

Claire takes the offered arm reflexively, muscle memory from decades of social graces acting before her mind can weigh the gesture. It’s courtly, familiar, and feels somehow… right, despite the strangeness of being the taller half in the equation. As they enter the hallway, Jane’s voice begins to speak just below her ear, and she recognizes the practical intent behind it.

“I passed Mark on my way in. I think he’s getting suspicious that I haven’t moved on by now, and I don’t think he’s cut ties with your husband, either.”

Claire learns many things from those words. Tonight’s dinner will be about Francis. Usher needs a dishonest explanation for Jane’s presence, which means everyone needs one, and it would be best if he didn’t see them meeting tonight.

Usher is probably the reason why Francis is still in D.C..

“Let’s take the back stairs, then.” No need to pass his office.

Jane's steps fall into sync with hers, until anyone listening behind the closed doors they pass would hear only one set of heels on marble as they approach the tucked-away door to the unsightly shortcut. Claire always feels strange in the dark, unfinished stairwell, weighty with meetings and liaisons that should never have happened under this roof. Jane lingers, freeing her arm to run the tip of one finger just below the prominent ash-stain on the wall. She never asks.

Claire remembers the last time they were here. Rejecting Jane’s advice that she step forward, claim this war as hers before Francis could. Defensive and unwilling to fully betray him, even as he was crafting his downfall behind her back.

“Would you kill him?” Her words are softer than the first click of her heel on the bottom stair. “If it were your husband?”

Jane keeps close by her side on the narrow spiral. “Well, I’ve never had one of those, and I don’t ever plan to.”

Inside, unseen, Claire feels some part of her smiling.

“But him?” Jane frowns. “Yes.”

Claire blinks, her step faltering.

Jane’s hand rests briefly at the base of her spine, steadying, but not apologetic. “There are men I don’t mind. There are even bad men I can… stomach. He isn’t one of those. He would have happily killed Cathy, you know, and Cathy’s not perfect, but she deserved better. If there’s one thing I can’t forgive, it’s men who take pleasure in hurting women for personal gain.”

“You must not forgive many men, then.”

“No.” A wry smile ghosts across Jane’s lips. “I don’t.”

It’s Claire’s turn to linger, one hand against the door. She makes no move to open it. "How long would you have kept trying, if I hadn’t been willing to do this?”

“Hmm?” Jane looks up at her, one foot still on the last step.

“You came here to put me in power.”

“Of course.”

“And if I hadn’t been willing to let you work against Francis? How could you possibly know—”

“That you weren’t happy?”

Claire stiffens. That isn’t the question. She wants to know why Jane was so sure she’d betray him, so sure that after nearly thirty years of perfect synergy, she could sweep into Claire’s life and tell her she’d go further without him. “Happiness is never my concern,” she parries, but the words sound hollow, here.

“I know.” Jane’s voice is still light. “But I’d like to see you happy, anyway.”

When Jane brushes past her and opens the door, Claire lets her.

Food is waiting, two setting of simple garden sandwiches, the executive chef come and gone.

“I brought wine, by the way.”

Claire catches sight of the long bag tucked behind Jane’s purse. It isn't allowed, outside food or drink, but somehow it doesn't surprise her that Jane successfully smuggled wine through White House security. 

“Nothing fancy, and I’m sure the executive blends are fantastic, but I am the guest.”

She breezes past Claire and into the kitchen, finding two glasses and the corkscrew with ease. She twists up the cork with frees it with one hand, holding the green glass with her last two fingers wrapped around it’s neck.

As they settle at the table, Claire thinks about all the drinks those pale, fine-boned fingers have poured, all the languages spoken over a glass of wine, brandy, fruit juice… And how many have held a few simple drops of the modern alchemist’s arsenic.

When Jane pours, she drinks without hesitation.

“We need to discuss the upcoming movement near Hama.”

Caught off-guard by the sudden turn towards talk of Syria, Claire sets down her glass with a frown. “We’ve had the Maar Shahour operation planned for almost two months. Tell me nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing,” Jane affirms. “Yet.” She eyes her open-face sandwich skeptically, as though weighing its potential as finger-food, then takes up her knife and fork. “We should let Russia get there first.”

Claire feels her hackles rising, neck arching, eyes narrowed. “You’re joking.”

“Not in the slightest.”

“We need that target. I haven’t been able to hold a press conference in weeks. We’ve had nothing to show, not one victory, since I started this.”

“I need two things to get your husband out of this country.”

The sudden shift leaves Claire reeling. “Excuse me?”

“First, he’s been quiet for too long. If he goes now, there’s no logic behind it, no reason. I need a catalyst. And second, what I’ve been waiting for all month that never happened. I need him to do something stupid.”

Jane takes a long, slow sip of wine, and Claire scrambles for the right question. “Why Maar Shahour?”

“I thought I could count on his ego to make my job easier, but he’s been very well behaved. I blame Mark's good influence. So we’re gonna need to manufacture something, a reason for him to flee, now of all times. What Maar Shahour could give us is a continued partnership—Why did Russia help him? What did they get in return? This operation began under his administration, not yours. If Russia shows up tomorrow and takes whatever ICO’s radical front has near Hama, it still hurts them, but it makes Russia look good instead of us.” She pauses to take a bite.

“And I blame Francis,” Claire offers.  _When you bring yourself down before someone else can, you control how it happens._ It’s his voice that echoes in her head.

“Exactly. Well, not you, it should come from the intelligence community, but that will be easy. It’s nothing obvious—an undercover operation that won’t be public until after it’s already failed, but it’s big, a big enough win to have been worth something to Petrov, had this really been your husband’s deal. And it's got a paper and personnel trail that leads right back to him. You’ve always been more publicly at-odds with Petrov, ever since that tragedy with the activist two years back. You're the one who's tough on Russia." Two fingers tap against Jane's phone, resting face-down beside her plate. "I can have the target leaked to the right people in Petrov’s sphere of influence with one quick call, and it will never come back to you.”

“Why this, why now?”

“Has he called you today?”

Claire’s fingertips itch with the sudden desire to reach for her phone, check for missed calls, but she knows the answer. It’s late, now, nearly eleven. 9:45 has come and gone; Friday is almost over. “How did you know—”

“Claire.” Jane’s gaze is calm, open. It’s disarming, but Claire’s defenses are bristling. “When have I been wrong?”

_Whenever it was convenient. Whenever Francis had something to lose._

“This isn’t a matter of right or wrong. You’re asking me to sacrifice our biggest strategic victory since Ahmadi for a plan I’m beginning to think I never should have asked you for in the first place.”

“How long were you gone, last time you left him.”

Claire’s jaw clenches. Her stare grows colder, spine rigid, shoulders tense. “I never—”

“In Texas. Just over a month, hmm? And before that, during the engagement.”

Claire sets down her silverware and pushes back from the table. “This conversation is over.”

Jane doesn’t even blink. She lifts her wine, calmly swirling the last few inches in the bottom of the glass. “All of June... half of July, wasn’t it?”

She can’t bring herself to leave her own kitchen, but her knuckles are white on the back of her chair. Jane shouldn’t know this much about her, but of course she does, of course she scoured every corner of Claire’s past before coming to her, of course she found those times, those rare moments when she almost decided, all on her own, that she was never going to win while she was playing his games. Of course.

That’s what Jane does.

“Up until this week, he still thought you would take his call. It's been over a month. I need you to prove him wrong, Claire. I need you to let him out of your life. For good.”

“I did.” Her words are sharp. “I have.”

“Then don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts about this. He’s been quiet because he thought he could wait you out.” Jane finishes her last bite and quickly dabs her mouth with her napkin. “If he’s gonna do something stupid, it’ll be today or tomorrow. _That’s_ why it has to be Maar Shahour.”

There it is again, that disarming smile of hers, the one that tempts Claire to let go of anger and discomfort and simply accept that Jane Davis is right, will likely always be right, and can make life very, very good for those who heed her advice.

But Jane isn’t always disarming.

She rises, circling the table to lean against the counter closest to Claire’s vacant seat. The closer she stands, the more Claire remembers all the mediocre men who shrink in on themselves in Jane's very presence, cringing away from her enviable ability to make them feel every empty moment of all they’ve never achieved, without even making them feel justified in their jealousy. Jane can make lesser beings feel exactly as small as they are, but not one of them would call her a bitch. Not to her face.

They’re too busy considering whether it’s unbecoming of statured men with young, pretty wives, to find Jane Davis beautiful.

Claire prides herself on being far, far better than those men. But sometimes, Jane makes her feel small, too.

“I know this is difficult for you—” There it is again, two fingers on the back of her hand, a _nothing_ sort of gesture that somehow feels brimming with compassion and understanding. And something else, something softer. Something like invitation. “—but things are gonna get so much better with this done. I’ll be able to work with you more closely, once Usher’s loyalties aren’t divided, once we can bring back LeAnn, rebuild your team.”

Such an artfully crafted existence, balancing her impossible appeal, her fey-like smile, the part of her Claire can't help but like, against the sharp edge in her eyes, the calm, capable set of her jaw that tells her, should she need it, her adversary’s next sleep will be his last.

_Not his last,_ she reminds herself. _Just the last on American soil._

Jane is standing too close, the faint brush of their hands distracting, unsettling, and welcome. Claire wonders how many other women find Jane disarming. She wonders at how unpredictable Jane has made her. She wonders if she is becoming dependent on Jane’s steady hand and disarming smile to make choices for her she wouldn’t have made alone.

Jane, Jane, Jane…

If Claire were a different sort of woman, this might be worry, but for now, it’s mostly wonder.

“If you tell me to wait, I’ll wait.” Jane’s hand rises, pushes a lock of hair behind Claire’s ear, as though she has as much right to Claire’s person as she has to Claire’s kitchen, Claire’s husband, Claire’s presidency.

_We should wait._

_I don’t want you to wait._

A knock delays her answer. Jane’s hand drops, but she doesn’t step away.

“Ma’am—”

It’s a different voice: male, out of place, and unexpected. Claire turns. He’s already inside, knuckles against the doorframe to announce his presence. Secret Service. No one else would have come in. “Yes, Miles?” Always best to be familiar with those she has no choice but to trust with her life. “What is it?”

“It—” The tall, broad-shouldered young man looks nervously over his shoulder. Claire has never seen one of her guards so fidgety. “It’s—”

Jane delicately clears her throat. She has one eyebrow raised, non-confrontational, but impatient.

The agent glances at her, blinks twice in rapid succession, and seems to regain some composure. “It’s your husband, ma’am.”

Claire frowns. “What about him?”

“He’s outside.”


	4. A Chapter Without Dignity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it’s been about ten fandom years but “my life” and “free time” are listed antonyms at thesaurus dot com so I hope you’ll forgive me and take the humbly offered other half of this nonsense as penance.

“He tried to come in through security.”

As Miles explains, Claire can’t keep herself from watching Jane. Jane is watching Miles, listening calmly, giving no sign she predicted this, that this was the stupidity she was waiting for.

“You revoked his access last month. They turned him away with no trouble, but… he went to the fence. It’s on the news now.”

Jane stands and drifts towards the far side of the room. She extracts the remote from the shallow drawer beside the stove and flicks on the screen in the alcove. Francis’s face appears in a crowd of the ever-present protesters whose candles and vigils and angry chants have only grown since he stepped down, and she started a war.

“Why wasn’t I informed when he got here?”

Miles frowns. “It’s after hours, Ma’am. It was deemed nonessential.”

“Evidently not. Thank you, Miles. You may go.”

“Ma’am, that’s not a friendly crowd. Should I tell security at the gate to let—”

“No. They have protocol, and they should keep it.”

The ice in her voice sends Miles from the room with a nod, still frowning.

Jane watches him leave, then turns up the volume.

_“The scene was first captured on Facebook live by an anti-war protester outside the White House.”_

A shaky, hand-held image fills the screen. Francis Underwood, clad in suit and tie, striding into the midst of the small but determined crowd of hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans pressed close to the iron fence. The chant of _“Don’t line the pockets of the corporations, fighting wars with smaller nations!”_ slowly peters to a stop, and the anchor cuts away from the feed.

_“The live-stream is now over forty minutes, though it began before former President Underwood arrived. He soon started taking questions—and quite a few angry words—from the crowd.”_

Real cameras must have arrived. The ensuing cut is clear despite the pressing darkness, and Francis seems to stare directly out of the screen, eyes lit from within, burning into hers. _“I used to come out and talk to you from that side of this fence. I wanted to listen, to hear what you had to say, to understand your fears and allay them with whatever answers I could provide.”_   He turns, away from the bulk of the crowd, towards the White House. Another camera picks up his steady gaze head-on. _“Then, all that concerned me was your fear. I thought, if I can fix that, if I can make sure you have nothing to be afraid of, I’ll have made this a better, safer nation.”_   He blinks. Slowly. Intentionally. _“I was wrong.”_

A ripple of shocked murmurs and nervous movement breaks the stillness of the huddled mass. Francis’s voice rises above it, letting their energy emphasize his words. _“Now, I  understand your anger. Yes, I supported this war, but not this way, conducted in secrecy, spending American lives with no clear mission and nothing to show for a month of silence and obfuscation. I came here for the same reason as you, tonight—to demand answers, to demand accountability.”_

Claire finds herself drifting forwards, pulling closer to the television. Jane falls in beside her, standing close.

 _“That’s your wife, you lying sack of shit!”_ echoes clearly from the back of the crowd. Claire notices the glowing red circle in the bottom left corner of the screen that indicates the feed is now live. No time to edit out unpleasantries.

At the outburst, Francis glances to his left, then inclines his head. _“I stand here today no different than you, a citizen like any other, concerned with the forces at work behind that fence. My wife is in there, yes, and I love her dearly.”_

Claire tenses as Jane’s hand comes to rest on her shoulder. _”But my wife would never start a war for personal gain. My wife would never go into battle to distract the American people from the truth. My wife—”_

Jane’s hands glides down her arm and slides into hers, twining their fingers together.

_“—My wife should be telling you everything you want to know!”_

As he spins his words and grand, open gestures, Claire can see the crowd turn, their energy falling into sync with his, until his anger is their anger, his words their words.

_“My wife has never shied away from honesty, and the fact that she’s in there now, avoiding you, avoiding your righteous outrage, your principled concern, makes me wonder.”_

All is quiet, the crowd, the kitchen. A perfectly conducted lull.

_“I wonder who has taken charge in my absence.”_

“How dare you,” Claire whispers.

Jane squeezes her hand, and Claire rips her eyes from the screen, pulling herself back from his spectacle.

“He’s trying to get a rise out of you.”

_“My wife has stood by this fence beside me! My wife has heard your fear, your anger, and she promised you safety, integrity, and truth!”_

“I know.” Claire doesn’t look, but she can still see him clearly, eyes blazing, jaw squared, the force of their shared lies packing punch into every word of feigned morality.

_“My wife should take responsibility for this!”_

The crowd roars assent, a flat, anguished bellow of impotent masculine pride.

“That man has no sense of dignity whatsoever.”

Her voice is so flippant, so dismissive, that Claire offers Jane a reluctant smile. “He never has.” 

She glances down at the hand in hers. With him, it’s always about the show of it, never the meaning. When Jane’s thumb brushes across her knuckles at her words, it’s all meaning, silent understanding, unspoken support.

_“Claire Underwood should come out here and face you—”_

She looks up again at her name, his name—strange to hear its entirety in his voice. The crowd has doubled in size, and camera has drawn back to take in the full spectacle. She realizes, then, just how small Francis seems, how tired, how helpless. He looks... aged. He wilts around the edges, a cut flower preserved by a vase of water and a window of sunlight, but uprooted, lacking something crucial to his continued survival. The only thing about him that hasn’t changed since he first set foot in the White House is his rage.

_“—and if she won’t do it, someone should open this gate right now, so I can find whomsoever is in charge in there, and drag him out here to do it for her.”_

By the time Claire turns away again, spine rigid, blood cold, the crowd has taken up a new chant.

_“Let him in! Let him in! Let him in!”_

But Jane’s hand is warm in hers, and golden curls tickle against her shoulder, left bare in her black, sleeveless dress. This close, Claire can smell jasmine, light and feminine, with the faintest hint of warm tobacco underneath, the ghost of a half-smoked cigarette. Familiar and new, ready and waiting.

She doesn’t want him in this home ever again.

“Turn it off."

With a press of Jane's finger and a squelch of static, silence falls.

"Make your call. I want him gone by morning.”


	5. A Chapter Without Francis

When Francis is gone, everything feels lighter, for a while. It’s everything Jane promised. LeAnn is back, the prodigal daughter who sometimes jumps at shadows. Cathy is back, surprisingly regal with her new, elegant cane. And he’s _gone_ , somewhere Claire couldn’t find him if she tried, somewhere she couldn’t go even if she wanted.

 Her first call with Petrov, she feels almost giddy, basking in his rage as she accuses him of harboring Francis, taunting that his people won’t appreciate his American sympathies, as though she believes every word of her own artful lie. But she quickly learns that Petrov gained more than they expected in Maar Shahour, and she may never know what that is. Petrov is tight-lipped, the Syrian government is emboldened, and the reasonable, hopeful, forward-looking side of ICO they have just begun negotiations with once again takes a backseat to those whose supposedly unsustainable radicalism has had new life breathed into its lungs.

Claire doesn’t feel light anymore.

It doesn’t help that Jane is gone. She’s there—Dubai, maybe, though Claire suspects she’s somewhere far closer to disaster. Not here, not beside her as she struggles to shape her victory and overcome her loss. She claws her way towards triumph thoroughly on her own, fighting to balance her unearthing of Francis’s deceit with the right degree of sorrow, of grief, to seem the proper wife. Betrayed, but not vengeful. Right, but not righteous. Competent, assured, but still familiar, caring.

And trustworthy.

That one, pollsters assure her, is a lost cause. (Among others. If she takes back her own last name, they tell her, she’ll never win a second term.)

And the war waits for no scandal. She’s locked in the situation room so often she sometimes misses Jane’s calls, on the rare occasions they come. She knows she’ll be back, but each day passing feels further and further from the brief month when Jane Davis lingered in the White House hallways, and a future where that once again becomes her reality never seems to get any closer.

Until it arrives. It’s always a hasty, messy plan. At most, she learns thirty hours in advance. A day here, a day there, red-eye flights dropping Jane into her orbit for a stolen breakfast, a hurried lunch… Each visit another start, a third, fourth, fifth beginning of something Claire is certain they should be done starting, should be moving well into the third act of, but there are always too many days between, long and aching with the endless trudge through a war it seems no one is winning, and so each visit is just another reset, a breath of fresh air that only serves to remind her how poisoned her lungs are, how many second chances she has already wasted.

Too soon, it’s autumn. The city shifts gracelessly out of summer, the weather uncooperative and too warm, everyone more harried than ever off the backs of ill-spent vacations, the world of distracted businessmen unprepared for the change in traffic patterns that comes with the advent of a new semester. For Claire, there’s been no vacation, and even the most frantic of school-time passersby are cleared off the street for the motorcade, but not everyone working beneath her is afforded that luxury. The summer hangover among her staff becomes her headache, their shortcomings her disasters to allay.

Some mornings, she takes five minutes to remember what a day without disasters used to feel like.

_Peaceful._

_Bland._

It’s a month of disasters, but maybe… necessary ones. Because it’s also a month of watching her staff resettle into their own skin. They busier they are, the less time there is for questions, accusations, the airing of personal grievance.

Claire likes it best that way.

The last Friday of the month begins more easily than most. The air feels different in the morning, crisp with the end of September, the White House loud with a veritable herd of young children tip-toeing like small, well-intentioned elephants around the side of her home she rarely sees. She’s supposed to sign something— not a bill, nothing so productive in all this mess, but an executive excellence award—so she can give the high-achieving fifth-graders the pens she used and satisfy the latest criticisms of distance, aloofness, and inaccessibility with a benevolent, maternal photo op. Instead, she finds herself shut behind doors with her National Security Advisor until the field trip has already moved on, and the freshness of the day wears away to something very typical.

Another meeting. A public transportation disaster in Houston. A terror attack in Damascus. A shocking death toll abroad and a smaller one in her own back yard and no easy way to balance the rhetoric of five dead Americans against the death of ninety strangers. Messes piling one on top of the last until the pounding in her head demands rest she can’t afford to take and then…

Jane.

Three hours later, left alone in the Oval after this day from hell, she can’t shake it, that restless difference that woke her early and never quite let her go, needle-thin claws digging into her shoulders and demanding she set aside paperwork, set aside the last three hours, and _move_.

Claire has never been the kind of person who runs to clear her head. She runs because it feels good, because physical exhaustion helps her fall asleep, and because she passed fifty two years ago and can’t afford to show any of the last ten, if she can help it.

Tonight, though, as she slips into tennis shoes, a loose tank top, and black capris, it’s thoughts, not years, that nip at her heels. Flashes of the last four months prowl behind her as she sets out towards the south drive and the newly-renovated track. It’s been about those same four months since she demanded security make this possible: raise the outer fence, add a brand new perimeter to the south lawn, replace a few of the centuries-old oaks with watch-stations dotting the grounds. As she passes the first and starts her run, she waves at the one-way glass. 

_Four months._ Measured in late-night jogs, it seems an inconsequential amount of time, a blur of tired limbs and a tired playlist she hasn’t had time to reconsider. As a measure of the time since her last breakfast with Jane, though… God. Has it really been four months? The memory shimmers, already hazy with lost time and unrealistically light for the women they are and the lives they’re leading, but she lets it wash over her, golden and warm in the darkness.

###

_Jane picks up Claire’s copy of the Sunday paper from the corner of the table and opens it beside her plate. One pages turns, then another._

_“Anything I should know about?” Claire asks._

_Jane looks up. “I’m sorry, did you not get a chance to read it?”_

_Claire’s lips twitch. “Not even the front page.”_

_“Probably for the best.” Jane offers a wry smile. “Journalists always have been particularly unkind when it comes to you.”_

_“It’s nothing compared to Francis.” Like an itch she can’t quite scratch, hidden deep between her diaphragm and ribs, he creeps up her throat and into the room. They haven’t talked about him since that night. Have hardly talked at all, really. That night, Jane had let go of her hand, made her phone call, set the world on its head, and vanished, as she so often did. There have been many silences since._

_Jane lets the cover fall shut, spinning the paper on the table between them until Claire can see the headline._

Claire Underwood: Pretty Smiles Can’t Hide an Ugly Record on Foreign Policy

_“You get it worse.” Jane reclaims the paper. “He earned his bad press with bad choices. Nobody felt the need to preface it with a quip bout his pretty face.”_

_“It would take quite the imaginative writer to call my husband pretty.”_

_Jane glances up again, still smiling. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. You’re definitely the prettier one in this equation. But you know what I meant.”_

_A glance at her own face, a smile snared in black and white behind the podium at her last press conference, and Claire sighs. She does._

_“And I know there are plenty of women trying to work in this city who’d rather not talk about it, act like you can avoid sexism if you just hold your head high enough above it and don’t look down, but I’ve never been one of them.”_

_This much, Claire knows. It’s a trait she admires in Jane, but it isn’t one she shares. It’s probably her mother’s fault, why she’s stuck somewhere between silent self-sufficiency and restless anger when it comes to the restrictions against her in the world of men. Hale women do not sully themselves with outward presentations of feminist sympathies, not unless they have something to gain. If they want to stand beside men, they must hold their heads high, as high as heels can raise them, right up till the waters rise higher still and threaten to sweep them away._

_It might be time to shed another of her mother’s shadows._

_“There’s nothing new in the article, since you asked,” Jane continues, undeterred by Claire’s silence. “Just a poorly written op-ed by someone who clearly has a lot of confused feelings about you.”_

_Claire can’t help a dry chuckle. “Ah. Lovely.”_

_“Men are disappointing that way, aren’t they? They see a woman they admire and their immediate instinct is to tear her down into something they think they can possess. Always the wrong response to… hmm.. Let’s call it the feminine mystique, for lack of a more original phrase.” Jane thumbs the corner of the paper, but doesn’t turn the page. “Always destroying instead of trying to understand.”_

_Claire tilts her head. It isn’t quite assent, but it isn’t argument, either._

_“One would think after a few centuries they would have figured out how to appreciate the artistry of the opposite sex without having to own it.”_

_“One would think,” Claire echoes softly. As Jane returns to the paper, Claire wonders if this conversation ever really returned to that headline, or if Francis is always going to slip out of her thoughts and right into Jane’s mouth._

###

Shaking off the heavier end of that morning memory, Claire picks up her pace as she rounds the first bend, loosening her shoulders and tucking her arms so close her elbows brush her hips with every pass. It was supposed to be business, that breakfast, that conversation. Why else was Jane there, if not to discuss ICO, her future, their war. But somehow, knowing that Jane had stepped off a fifteen hour flight just to casually dismiss the less-fair half of the human race as nothing more than green-eyed, uncultured bullies who’d held too much power for too long had a way of keeping her warm in memory in a way business never would. That visit, and the ones which came after, lingered like an unavoidable soundbite, effective advertising, sneaking into her thoughts as she got dressed for bed on late nights, creeping up on her now despite the music in her ears.

It’s not surprising, after the way they’d left things fifteen minutes ago in the Oval, that she can’t out-run the memory of the one bright spot in an otherwise horror of a day. She presses the volume one click higher, then two, but that particular low, husky voice filters through undeterred.

One visit winds forward into the next, an equally surreal stolen moment in late July, when damp heat was strangling the city, and Jane rolled in with a thunderstorm for lunch.

###

_“I’m drenched.”_

_Claire’s smiling, bemused. Drenched may be an understatement. Jane’s skirt is plastered to her thighs, blouse clinging like a second skin. Her hair has faired slightly better, only the ends darkened and dragging at her collar. No one has come in dry today, umbrellas useless against the wind sending rain up every nook and cranny at ninety degrees to the pavement. Claire and her night guard—now on the tail end of their shift—seem the only ones completely dry in the building. A privilege of sleeping where one works._

_“Don’t let me sit on that,” Jane protests when Claire starts towards the white couches. “Could we take this out on the patio?”_

_Claire blinks, then laughs. “Then I’ll be just as drenched as you are.”_

_“Madam President.” Jane lifts an eyebrow “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little rain.”_

_To her own surprise, Claire feels hesitation weighing in the pit of her stomach. As though to punctuate her indecision, the wind shifts, and sheets of rain begin to drum against the glass in the east door and the back windows. Less than inviting. And yet, it’s a day of more papers than meetings, so no one that matters is going to see her looking like a drowned cat. It’s hard to believe she’s even considering it, but there is a kind of magnetism to a summer storm… and nothing to lose but a little dignity._

_Besides, something about the way Jane says “Madam President” has always felt a bit like a dare._

_She crosses the room and opens the door just wide enough to gesture Jane out ahead of her without letting in too much of the storm. The air outside smells like bruised flowers, late-season hyacinths battered by the rain._

_“You were one of the first, you know,” she says, leaning against the railing that looks out into the rose garden. The wind has shifted again, and the first few feet of the patio are sheltered by the overhang at the start of the colonnade, so only her feet are getting wet, though she’s sure that won’t last. Jane leans beside her, elbows nearly touching, close enough to be easily heard even when battling against a downpour and the occasional roll of thunder._

_“Hmm?”_

_“One of the first to call me that. Madam President. During the election.” She lets her fingers play in the droplets beading the white paint, cool to the touch. “Almost the only one.”_

_“Ah. While everybody else made ‘acting’ into three syllables, you mean.” Jane smiles, but it has a hard, knowing edge. “As if you needed reminding.”_

_Francis was the first, Claire remembers with sudden clarity. He never slipped, never missed the opportunity to emphasize that she was only acting, only temporary. After Francis had come Petrov, then others. Reminding. Warning._

_“Heaven forbid you forget your place and think yourself the real president,” Jane continues, turning to lean back against the rail. “Well. You’ve proven all their greatest fears and then some.” She leans closer, peering up at her through intent eyes. “Did you bring a cigarette?”_

_Claire touches her breast pocket reflexively, hesitates, then draws it out, the single slim vice she had slipped from her bottom-drawer hideaway when she heard Jane was coming. She doesn’t ask how Jane knew, and doesn’t ask why. They haven’t shared one, not yet, but ever since she began to catch the scent of it in Jane’s curls after particularly trying days and calls taken outside, she’s been tempted, and has carried the temptation close at hand. She can’t shake the urge to share small joys with this woman—breakfasts, cigarettes, a D.C. summer rain—but isn’t sure how far she can walk down the paths she’s already tread for so many years with Francis before this becomes something she doesn’t want it to, something old, known, and tired. The mix of business and pleasure has always been heady, intoxicating. Claire isn’t sure she can imagine having it any other way._

_Jane pulls a black lighter from her purse, shattering her train of thought as she thumbs the flip-top open with a click. Claire settles the cigarette between her lips and leans in as Jane offers the flame. Eerily in-sync, they both move to shield it from the rain. Their hands brush, and Jane laughs, low and easy, as Claire breathes in, watching the paper light, watching the tobacco curl, watching Jane’s hand flip her lighter closed again._

_Watching Jane’s eyes on her lips._

_After one slow drag, Claire hands off the prize. Jane takes it between two fingers and raises it towards the rain. “Cheers,” she says, her voice still light with the ghost of laughter. “To embodying the greatest fears of men.” She puts it to her lips for a quick pull, sighs out only the faintest breath of smoke, and returns it._

_Claire finds herself hesitant again. She’s already half forgotten their earlier words in the haze of intimacy wrapped up in the sharing of a cigarette, and this is the edge of a sentiment she should find distasteful, something that walks the fine line between audacity and disrespect she can hardly afford to cross, now that she’s liberated herself from the perfect performance of marriage. “It’s bad luck, isn’t it?”_

_“What, a toast without a drink?” Jane chuckles, and Claire feels the sound roll down the back of her neck like the droplets of water beneath her fingertips. “Honey, you don’t need luck.”_

_It sounds like a compliment, and the feather-light term of endearment settles so easily after the laugh, that the cigarette is half-raised before she can weigh reason or meaning._

_When it’s back between her lips, Jane adds, “You’ve got me.”_

_Claire realizes, then, she isn’t toasting herself, her final taking of the mantle of the presidency with no “acting” strings attached. Instead, Jane has her toasting… them, on this balcony, a stolen moment away from those who would voice judgment, two women sharing a summer-storm cigarette while holding the power usually reserved for cigars in smoke-filled back rooms, ready to chart the course of the world. “The greatest fears of men,” she echoes under her breath in a stream of smoke, and the gleam in Jane’s eyes presents the most compelling case for further audacity and disrespect that Claire has ever seen._

###

The realization she’s come full-circle doesn’t occur to her until she passes the first guard-station again. The track is lit, but the grounds beyond disappear in darkness, offering little distraction from her thoughts. That day may well have been the single best of her presidency. The cigarette had lasted through Jane’s news—good news, a guarantee that Petrov had been bluffing his way through Maar Shahor, had gained nothing of consequence—before the rain had chased them inside again. Jane lingered through the start of an impromptu meeting with the Russian ambassador (he arrived thoroughly confused and embarrassed to find Claire windswept and rainworn) but he was quickly cowed by the fire in her eyes and the cold edge of power Jane’s carefully-gathered intelligence lent to her words.

But Jane had slipped out towards the end of Claire’s carnage, taking a call from which she never returned, and had gotten back on a plane that same afternoon. By evening, the White House had regained it’s particular power for demanding second-guesses, breathing the poison vapor of distrust and dishonesty into the mouths of everyone who walks its halls. As another month ticked by, no amount of calls could coax Claire into forgetting that every week Jane was away, she was breaking a promise, avoiding Claire’s demand that she stay.

She’s grateful, really, for the insight Jane brings back from abroad. She understands necessity. She understands war. She understands doing whatever is required to win this.

But that doesn’t stop her from wanting things to be different.

The song changes, beating quicker and louder through her headphones, and she lets it carry her, picking up speed for her second circuit of the quarter-mile track. For three minutes and fifty-four seconds, it’s enough, enough to run, to let the pounding of her heart drum louder in her head than memories, but by the time she’s pushed through into her third pass by the watch-station, today has caught up to her, in all the disaster and all the unexpected surprise that came with it.

Disaster is too small a word for September, really. It has been a month straight from the depths of hell. First, new accusations about Claire’s own involvement with Russia followed in the wake of her harsh words with the ambassador. Soon, someone dredged up the intern of a former scheduling assistant who’d gone on to work in the Russian embassy, and Claire couldn’t even recognize her name, let alone recall exchanging so much as a hello, but that didn’t stop the whirl of gotcha headlines and resurgent memes of her in bed with Petrov, now with the unfortunately pretty intern photo-shopped into the mix.

But today had eclipsed Russia in the worst of ways. Ninety dead to terror in Damascus consumed her morning, and by afternoon someone had claimed the Houston metro accident as a warning—a terror threat on the eve of her first planned visit to Texas and her hometown since the campaign. Claire spent the day making nice over canceled travel plans, calling grieving family members, escaping her second press conference, her third briefing with the Joint Chiefs, and Jane’s calm presence between buzzing walls seemed little more than a scattered dream.

Until three hours ago.

Claire presses herself at the bend, straining against exhaustion, setting the music louder still, staring down the darkness as though this is another battle she can win. The self-inflicted distraction isn’t enough. Disregarding her will, the music fades into white noise against the competition of too-fresh, too-recent memory.

###

_Jane is standing in the Oval Office, a vision in startling white slacks and a close-cut crimson blazer, when Claire stumbles in at quarter to midnight on the darkest Friday of her presidency._

_“It’s growing on me, you know?” She stands in front of the stark black and gray of Claire’s favorite painting. It’s a flash of déjà vu, golden waves silhouetted against a cold, flat sea. “It sits better in this office.”_

_“Jane,” Claire greets, careful not to let her surprise into her voice as she struggles to rid her posture of the exhaustion she feels. Ninety-one dead in Damascus. Five dead in Houston. All of it too easily blamed on her. Some of it even feels like it ought to be._

_Jane hears anyway. “You forgot— That’s okay. Danger of doing so many of our meetings off the books.” She levels with Claire from across the room, taking measure with nothing more than ten seconds of silence and a steady, knowing smile. “You’re dead on your feet. I don’t have anything that can’t wait ’til morning.”_

You’ll still be here in the morning? _Claire thinks, but she’s too tired for accusations and petty anger. “No, Jane, please,” she offers instead. “Stay. I could use some…” She hesitates, crossing to sit on the couch, unwilling to spend another moment standing in her cruelest, most commanding heels. “…competent news.”_

_Jane makes no motion to join her. “Well. I hate to say it, but you’ve caught me on a tricky evening for competent.”_

_At those words, Claire once again feels the fullness of the day weighing, dull and heavy, behind her eyes. It was a headache three hours ago. Now, it’s become so ever-present it’s nothing more than background noise, an all-consuming white-hot hum. “Bad news from a competent source, then,” she amends, not in the mood to summon disappointment and feign real displeasure. Jane is back, Jane is here, against all odds. Personal feelings of abandonment aside, Jane has proven herself beyond Claire’s wildest expectations of any non-Underwood political ally. Bad news from Jane has always been merely a hitch in a plan predestined to succeed, never the start of failure._

There’s a first time for everything, Claire, _his voice taunts, the one she can’t seem to escape no matter how far around the world she sends him._

_“ICO is considering a deal with the Russians.”_

_As Jane’s words sink in, Claire finds herself rising again in sudden anger, ignoring protesting ankles and her own civil advice. “Unacceptable.” She paces the limited space between couch and table. “We made it perfectly clear that Russia has nothing to offer. You should have put a stop to that before… before you set foot in—” She pauses, wincing at the needles her own voice sends stabbing through her skull. She barely recognizes her cold fury, until she feels it again, the ghost of conversations held back-to-back in opposing mirrors, his instinct to respond to any shortcoming not his own with immediate rage and a cruel tongue. Claire closes her eyes, retakes her seat, and wraps the last vestiges of her ever-present poise tight about her shoulders. Francis is her demon to fight, now, not Jane’s. Jane has already done her part. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped. I—I’ve had a headache since this morning.”_

_It’s a weak apology, but Jane isn’t ruffled, her posture still as calm and open as before Claire’s outburst. “What happened to that Gelsemium I gave you?”_

_She looks up sharply, but Jane’s face is expressionless. “I used it for… a more pressing occasion.”_

_“Ah.” It’s no more than a toneless acknowledgment of her words, no hint of the thoughts behind it._

_“You wouldn’t happen to have any on you?” The prospect of bureaucratic reports still waiting to be read at the end of this evening puts a hold on her unwillingness to admit weakness. She’s not sure her head will survive fine print past midnight._

_“You know, I haven’t needed it for myself in a while. Gave my leftovers to you.”_

_Claire knows, then, with unsettling surety, that Jane understands where hers has gone._

_“Let me give you the marginally better news.” She finally approaches as she speaks. Claire expects her to take the other couch, to sit as council, where heads can bend close across a spread of deals and decisions as knees rest on either side of the tabletop—their familiar routine. Instead, she continues, pacing behind Claire's seat, out of sight._

_She frowns. From anyone else, she would suspect a power play, but she and Jane are well beyond such juvenile posturing._

_When two fingers press unexpectedly against her temples, Claire jumps._

_“Didn’t mean to startle you.” Jane’s low, river-gravel voice seems to come from all sides. “I thought I could offer some pain relief the good old fashioned way.”_

_Claire feels an uncanny desire to laugh, but Jane’s fingers followed her when she flinched, and are even now beginning to trace cool, gentle circles on the pulse throbbing to either side of her eyes. “Ms. Davis—”_

_“I made headway with Fayyaad el-Naim.” Jane continues her news as though nothing has changed, as though Claire’s reflexive retreat to a last name and title aren’t intended to dissuade familiarity. As though she always holds Claire’s head in her hands during her briefings. “I know, we weren’t going to deal with anyone in that faction, but I got a tip, and I thought it was worth a try. He’s interested in legitimacy.”_

_Claire considers pulling away, creating distance, but instead, her shoulders draw closer to the back of the couch. Her blood seems to obey Jane’s fingers as they smooth away the worst pain of the day, slowly draining each inch of tension stretching the surface of her brain and replacing it with nothing more than the gentle calm of her touch and the reassuring apology of her words._

_“He’ll be in the negotiations with Petrov’s people. He’ll delay, at least.”_

_Delay. Better news than she’s had all month._

_“Thank you.”_

_Jane’s fingertips leave her temples and slide lower to trace the vulnerable skin behind ear and jawbone. Her thumbs wander lower still, stroking up and down the column of her neck with sure, gentle pressure. Claire feels her skin shivering, but her body hasn’t felt this warm since July._

_“Jane—” she whispers, unsure, for the first time in many years, what her next words will be._

_Jane saves her from uncertainty. “Madam President,” she cuts in, voice light and calm. Her thumbs find the tension between Claire’s shoulder blades with ease, pressing in with slow, inescapable intent. “You’ve had a long day.”_

_Her shoulders fall, boneless and foreign, and her head rolls slowly down and to the side, exposing the rest of her neck and upper back to Jane’s soothing touch._

_Claire is almost angry with her body for its betrayal, then. She expects more; more of an explanation, a hint of apology, as though any words could make Jane’s hands on her bare, tired shoulders into anything less than the simple, blissful relief they are in this moment. Yet somehow, those words are just enough. She_ has _had a long day, and a long yesterday just past, and long, exhausting days, weeks… months, now, stretching out before and behind her, the unholy halo of power and its keeping that curls into a personal eternity, circling the earth with its event-horizon light, sucking down her first hundred days._

_And Jane’s sure, steady hands spell “I know” into her tired skin, never as strong as it needs to be to bear the mantle of divinity, but more resilient with this eerie, disarming woman to share the burden._

_So all Claire can think is how much she’s missed her, and all she can offer in reply is another slow, sincere whisper of, “Thank you.”_

_She’s startled by the vulnerability in those two words, and perhaps Jane is too, for her hands still in the silence. Then, they return, tracing feather-light up the back of her neck to slide, all ten fingers, into her hair. Claire shivers as nails lightly scrape her scalp, fingertips drawing curves and circles from hairline to jawline, and her eyes fall closed._

_“You can’t have had an easy day, either,” she prompts softly, hoping that, if she can’t summon the resistance to actually pull away, she can at least distract herself from just how good those knowing fingers feel on her skin. “Fifteen hour flight?”_

_“Mm,” Jane agrees. “But I sleep remarkably well in first class.”_

_“Will you be able to stay?” She realizes it’s an unclear question, something she avoids at all costs, but Jane answers it as she intended._

_“For a while. This deal’s gonna take more finesse on our end than theirs. I have plenty of people to talk to in the District before I need to get on another flight.”_

_“I would ask what you’re going to propose, but I’m not sure I can play at real diplomacy right now.”_

_“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not here to take advantage of your long day, and my ways of getting what I want out of the Middle East rarely involve a head massage."_

_Claire could be mistaken, but she thinks there is more weight than strictly necessary on the clarifying element. “How about… in the general sense?” Her voice is ghostly, breathless and relaxed._

_“Hmm?”_

_“Getting what you want.”_

_Jane laughs, then, and her hands drop back to Claire’s shoulders. “In the general sense—” She leans close, a curl falling forward over Claire’s shoulder to tickle her throat. “—any time you’re feeling a little bit better, I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted.”_

_All at once, she withdraws, circling the rug to finally settle on the opposite couch. Claire feels exposed, coming face to face after a faceless conversation, but she buries it between the pages of photos Jane hands her—pictures of war. It’s business then, for an hour, two, until it’s late enough in the night that any decision feels like a bad one, and Claire knows she’s only asking Jane questions to keep her here._

_“It’s late,” she finally admits. “And if it gets much later it would be rude for me to send you home. I can offer a glass of wine and a guest room, if you’ve had enough travel for the day.”_

_Jane smiles. “Tempting, but I really prefer to sleep under my own roof when I’m back from a series of hotels.” She rises, gathering her papers back into her purse._

_Claire follows, taking to her feet. Her headache is gone._

_But t_ _he room feels heavy with missed opportunity._

###

And it’s too late to be out here, too late to be running, dooming herself to an exhausted day tomorrow and a crippling return of the pounding headache Jane chased away just three hours before, but if she can’t have answers, closure, or anyone she much cares for beside her, she’ll damn well have this, the illusion of freedom as her shoes grip at the dark anonymity of the path beneath them, the strain in her lungs that taunts her to run farther, faster, to chase the shadow of stolen cigarettes from her breath and the memory of stolen moments with a golden-haired and ghostly confidant from her thoughts.

But she can sense the agents chatting behind the guard-station walls, can still taste the slim half-length of tobacco resting in the ash tray from her first minutes alone after Jane had left her in the Oval, and it feels just as thoroughly impossible to run away from memories of things that didn’t happen, as it has been running away from every insignificant moment that has.

She forces herself to finish her full routine. But she turns down the music, doesn’t fight the memory of Jane’s lips brushing her cheek as she passed through the door with a hand on Claire's shoulder, a parting half-embrace that Claire barely managed to return, leaving her alone in the Oval with a two a.m. cigarette, untouched paperwork, and the all-consuming urge to run.

She slows to a walk as she approaches the three wide steps that lead up from the mouth of the drive where her water bottle and a white towel are waiting. She paces in brisk figure-eights, slowing her heart without letting her legs tighten up, before reaching for the towel. When she straightens from a slow stretch, she spots a golden silhouette on the other side of the fence.

The wind drifts, catching a few strands of Jane’s hair in its crossfires, pulling them across her face, teasing at the bridge of her nose. The image is dreamlike, surreal, and Claire has the briefest flash of worry she’s fallen asleep at the Resolute again; any minute now a blushing aide will wake her with a nervous whisper of “Ma’am?”

But no, Jane is very much real, very much here. “I’m sorry,” she says as Claire approaches, drawing near as though pulled by an invisible hand. “I didn’t leave fast enough.”

Her voice stumbles when Claire gets closer. She blinks slowly, one hand rising nervously to rub at the back of her neck. Her gaze is wandering, landing everywhere but Claire’s eyes. When there’s only a foot between each of them and the fence, Jane rocks back slightly on her heels, biting her bottom lip. “Have you ever punched anyone?”

Claire feels a huff of disbelieving laughter escape at the unexpected question. Before she can come anywhere close to formulating a reply, Jane shuts her eyes and shakes her head, then opens them again to finish her explanation as though she hadn’t just wondered aloud about the president’s potential for violence. “Mark caught me in the lobby, and by the time I finally satisfied his fixation on el-Naim, I was just heading out when I saw you coming up the path.”

It’s hard to hear over the pounding of her heart and the pulse of blood in her ears, but as Claire works to re-regulate her breathing, she can’t help but notice that Jane’s voice is slower, words low as the explanation glides and wavers with the flicker of her eyes over Claire’s shoulders, down the curve of her waist, lingering on faint trembling of her thighs.

“So you stopped me to ask about my history of physical assault.”

Jane cocks her head with a small, guilty smile. “I didn’t want you to wonder,” she hedges softly. “If you saw me leaving without explanation.”

“Is that all?” Claire asks, voice light, breath almost steady again. She lifts the towel off her shoulder and runs it once over her face, then quickly through her hair.

Jane blinks slowly. “Is it ever?”

The words are so soft Claire might have missed them, but it’s hard to miss distraction in Jane’s gaze as it follows the path of the towel down the back of her neck, the slow shift of her weight from left foot to right.

 “Should I be worried?” she presses, not at all invested in Jane’s conversation with Usher, but very, very invested in continuing _this_ conversation. It’s the closest she’s come to seeing Jane… affected by her, and not in a calculated, intentionally distracting, word-games sort of way.

“Hmm?” Jane’s eyes slowly return to hers. “Oh, Mark.” She frowns. “Probably. We have…” Her head tilts thoughtfully to the left. “…a long history. Friendly, but not always. In all the years I’ve known him, he’s never stuck to a Democrat this long. I was so sure he’d leave with Francis, cut ties, go back to the Republican resistance. I can’t quite get at why he’s still here.”

Claire twists slowly, left hand across her waist, stretching the muscles on either side of her spine which have begun to protest the incomplete post-workout routine. Jane’s gaze follows her hand, distracted, straying. Claire’s smile goes unseen. “Not for the same reasons as you, then?”

Startled, Jane looks up. She quickly schools her expression. “If you’re talking about getting you the White House, I think we can rest assured he’d have left when you didn’t make him vice president.”

Claire pauses her movement, then sighs. This is a more important discussion than she wanted.

Unexpectedly, Jane’s voice softens. “You do know I’m not just here because I want the ear of the president.”

Claire’s lips part, then close again, and she lifts her chin, studying Jane side-long down the bridge of her nose. 

Jane’s eyes widen. “Claire—”

“Do I?”

She earns a frown in return. Jane pushes her bag up her arm and tucks it into the crease of her elbow. “I think it’s past time for us to say goodnight.” She turns stiffly, and Claire feels a wave of unexpected guilt wash over her. Before she can take two steps away from the fence, Claire calls after her. 

“Wait. Jane…”

She stills, back to the lawn, and Claire can hear her sigh. “Madam President—”

“I don’t know that, do I?” she presses before Jane can get any farther away. There’s a bite in her voice, a touch of anger rising with her still-quick pulse in a way that surprises her, but maybe it shouldn’t. Anger has always been easier than guilt. “It’s always been clear my presidency is useful to you, to Mark. I appreciate everything you’ve done to bring me here, and all you've done since. Beyond that…” Jane pivots to face her again, and Claire catches a flash of similar anger sparking in her eyes. It gives her pause, but she finishes her thought. “…you’ve been distant.”

“I’ve been busy,” she parries. The anger in her eyes doesn’t reach her words, as calm and unflappable as ever. She glances left, then right, then back again, before finally spotting the latch of the gate. The entrance blends in to the rest of the inner fence, but it isn’t locked, and she lets herself inside. “I thought you’d want a little space, after—”

“I’m not talking about Francis.”

“Neither am I.”

There’s even more distance between them now than there was on either side of the fence, and Claire finds herself feeling lost in it, unsure how to close the gap her accusation has opened. “Then why?”

“What do you want me to say?”

The calm words set her temper rising again, never fond of Jane’s love affair with maieutics and far too tired to answer diplomatically. “I want you to be honest with me.”

Jane smiles, then, a little sadly. “I always have been.”

The night fills the silence with late-summer crickets and the distant pulse of a passing car on Pennsylvania avenue. Claire can’t meet her eyes. She reaches for her water on the nearest step, uncomfortable with the stillness in the wake of her fading anger, and drinks slowly, head back so she can stare at the nothingness of the sky past the competing glow of the track lights.

She believes her. Part of her always does. It’s _that_ she can’t trust, and she knows it. Because Jane is disarming, too easy to forgive, and too rarely anywhere Claire can watch her, too familiar when she returns. And if it were only that, only the look in Jane’s eyes when she sits in on Claire’s phone calls, only the late-night talks with too-intimate hands on her shoulders, only the slow, easy smile when she says _Madam President…_ That, she could handle. That she could trust.

But then there’s two weeks of silence, two months in the Persian Gulf, two a.m. conversations with Mark Usher, and plans that never quite go the way they’re supposed to. And Claire knows all too well the danger of letting personal trust get too close to political power.

“I’m running out of ways to tell you I’m on your side, Claire.”

Something about her name on Jane’s lips always tempts her towards honesty. She sets the bottle back on the steps. Studies it. It lacks a shadow, dead-center beneath the nearest light, and not quite touched by the shadows of the wrought-iron bars behind it. Her newest fence. Her choice among undesirable choices, her safety always first, sanity secondary. There’s nowhere like this for her, nowhere she can disappear, no light strong enough to chase away the watching shadows. Her vulnerability to outside threat never seems quite real enough to warrant all the precaution. Not when she can feel dangerous, furious, covetous eyes on her from every angle, every minute of every day, no matter how many walls she puts between herself and “danger.”

And it’s those eyes in the way of honesty, now. Claire doesn’t want to share honesty with them. She doesn’t want to share _this_ with them, doesn’t want to share Jane, who deserves so much better than her reflexive distancing and reactionary anger. Strange, how decades of ambivalence seem to have suddenly caved in the face of something she genuinely, frighteningly wants. But she can feel their attention, their eager stare, their hunger for whatever truth Jane can draw from her.

She wants them gone.

Instead, she has to choose: honesty for none, or honesty for all.

_Then l_ _et them have it._ It’s a little bit his voice, but it’s hers, too. _They’ve never known what to do with honesty, anyway._

But perhaps Jane will.

“Tell me you didn’t stay because of him.” Claire stares up at her. Jane is half in shadow, purse in hand, looking small and otherworldly and as tired as Claire feels. “When I asked you… When you stayed... Tell me it wasn’t only to be sure I would see it through. That you didn’t only stick around long enough to convince me to send him away." Jane breathes in like she wants to answer, but Claire isn't finished. "Tell me it isn’t always going to be like this, only showing up when you have a new tip for me, a new card to play against ICO. Tell me it won’t always be twenty days gone for every one here.”

Jane hesitates, both hands clasping the straps of her bag, twisting aimlessly about the leather. Her head tilts just a few degrees, and her eyes flick downwards, breaking away from Claire’s intent gaze.

“I’m learning to read you, you know,” she says. “Not often, but when it counts.”

She steps forward and sets the bag on the steps beside her, bending slowly, straightening again with a glint in her eyes that catches Claire off guard. She isn’t about to let Jane dodge her demand with that complete lack of subtlety, but there’s quickly becoming very little space between them, and something about the set of Jane’s jaw, the purpose in stride as she descends the steps, has Claire worried she might actually forget to breathe, blatant misdirection be damned.

“Sometimes it’s your eyes, but more often its here.”

She raises a hand and runs one finger down Claire’s throat, just to one side. Claire resists the sudden and competing urges to either flee, or lean in to the touch.

“Achilles heel,” she murmurs. Three fingers rest between Claire’s collarbones. “Some quirk of nature that always leaves the most powerful with an unexpected vulnerability.”

Jane doesn’t meet her eyes, staring absently at her own fingers against Claire’s skin. The back of one nail traces slowly up along a tendon, crosses to the other, and slides down again. “This space here… It’s so deep, like something’s missing. I can actually see your pulse through the skin in the hollow of your throat.”

At that, Claire starts to draw back. “Are you telling me I should wear more scarves?” She tries for levity, but Jane’s smile isn’t light at all.

“Oh, heaven forbid. Then I’d never know what you were thinking.” Her hand hovers between them, slowly lowers towards Claire’s waist.

She expects a touch that never comes, though she can feel the warmth of Jane’s palm radiating through the thin nylon of her shirt like a small sun despite the heat of her own skin and the muggy weight of the cool but humid early-autumn night.

“Besides, I don’t think there are many people who get so close to you they can measure your heartbeat.”

Claire closes her eyes and pushes all air silently from her lungs. It keeps her from speaking for as long as it takes to breathe in again, and she holds herself empty until she feels dizzy, lightheaded, and still wants to say the same words.

She breathes in.

“Are you ever going to kiss me?”

When she opens her eyes, Jane’s smile is softer.

“I was starting to think you were never gonna ask.”

Claire feels air scraping it’s way up her throat, and it comes out in a nervous laugh, a sound she hasn’t heard herself make in years. She bites her lip against a real, lopsided, teeth-baring grin threatening to take over what little remains of her poise, but then she doesn’t have to worry about childish nerves and the pretense of composure, because Jane is leaning in, exactly as tall in her casual heels as Claire is in tennis shoes, the perfect level to answer Claire’s question with a kiss.

Mmm.

God, she's soft—Incredibly soft, incredibly gentle. Jane’s lips are warm with the kind of heat that could melt her and soft with the kind of caring that could make Claire forget why that would be a bad thing. The president can’t _melt_ , after all. Can’t feel weak-kneed and languid and make a tiny little sound in the back of her throat as her fingers slide up Jane’s waist, over her shoulders, and tangle in golden curls that make the skin on the backs of her hands tingle like she’s suddenly standing in sunlight, and yet that’s exactly what Claire is doing, and she is the president, after all, so maybe the president can melt, once in a while, and if she’s not going to stop herself, well. No one else will, either.

Except Jane, of course. Pulling back, letting their foreheads rest together for a moment as Claire remembers to breathe. Jane rises an inch further on tip-toe and kisses Claire’s temple, and the air is still sticky, but it smells like clean jasmine and crisp smoke, and Claire wants to bury her face in the curve of Jane’s neck, probably live there forever.

“Okay,” she whispers instead, and she can feel Jane smiling against her forehead. She gives in, pressing her lips just below Jane’s ear in an open-mouthed kiss, tasting the night on her skin. “I think you answered my questions,” she manages, speaking softly, lips brushing the side of her throat.

Jane hums, a hand rising to run her fingers through Claire’s hair. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t think I did.”

Claire pulls back, stiffening, unsure of the tone of Jane’s voice. She's met with a reassuring smile. 

“Yes, to kissing you, to all of that. I’ve wanted to for, well… lets just say ‘a while’ and leave things there. And no, please believe me when I say it won’t always be like this.”

Confused, Claire searches Jane’s eyes, open and earnest, pupils large and dark, but she doesn't find answers there.

“I've been leaving because I want to help you.”

It hits home, the sudden realization that, finally, Jane is answering the accusations she dodged before. Claire isn’t sure she wants an answer, now; isn’t sure she needs one. Her skin feels more awake and alive than it did through her entire run, more present and ready to face disasters now than when she’d had her first cup of morning coffee some eighteen hours ago. She wants to bask in it, the easy release of the pent-up static that had been charging the space between them since Jane's hands had stolen her headache, since Jane's lips had shared her cigarette, since Jane had come back into her life. To finally reap the rewards of patience and dangerous honesty. But Jane is offering words instead, so the least Claire can do is show a little restraint, and listen. 

“I stay away to get things done. It doesn’t have to be like that, but when you don’t know what you want…" Jane shrugs. "The most good I can do is overseas. But I’ll be here, if you tell me that’s what you want. Just… ask me.”

Claire has an overwhelming urge to kiss the hint of sadness out Jane’s earnest, crooked smile, but Jane is still talking, so Claire holds herself in check.

“Talk to me. I know, really, I do—you’re a woman of few words. It’s always served you well to let others fill the silence with whatever it is you’re hoping to uncover. But I wanna know what you’re thinking. I’m good at guessing—” Claire smiles at the casual understatement of Jane’s eerie intuition. “—professionally. That’s why you pay me the big bucks.” Jane steps closer again, cupping Claire’s face in one hand, running a thumb absently along the curve of her cheekbone. “I don’t want to guess when it comes to this.”

Her last words are so soft, so earnest, Claire feels them like a dagger between her ribs, sharp and painful, piercing right through places that should be protected by armor. She feels raw, split open, exposed, and she thinks maybe it’s only painful because she hasn’t felt this in so long, hasn’t let anything in this far below her skin in so many years of calculated choices and uncomplicated, dangerless pleasures.

Oh, this is so, so dangerous.

_Good._

This time, she moves first, pulling Jane’s hand away from her face, twining their fingers and pressing them down by Jane’s side as she closes the last inches between them, her other hand reaching urgently for Jane’s cheek and into her hair, drawing her in, capturing her lips. She’s not as soft as Jane was, not as gentle, but Jane doesn’t seem to mind at all, grasping at Claire’s neck with her free hand, holding them together so tightly that Claire can let go, can let her hand wander away from tangled curls, trailing the soft lines of an arched throat, the rise of a shoulder, gliding down the curve of Jane’s waist until she finds the band of the white slacks that had so distracted her in her office—and the rise of bare skin above it.

Her breath hitches in her throat as she inches Jane’s blouse higher, sliding her fingers underneath until she can rest her palm flat against Jane’s ribs, reveling in the smooth warmth, the goosebumps rising at her touch, almost disguising a faint raised line Claire can feel the beginning of on her lower back—a scar? Jane shivers and draws in a breath against Claire’s lips, just enough space between them that Claire can feel every time their mouths brush, feel the air like a phantom kiss against her upper lip. Some part of her knows Jane asked for words, but words can come later. For now, she needs this, needs to feel Jane respond to her, needs to chase away guesses and ghosts with lips and fingertips and the impossibly soft skin of the iron-willed woman in her arms. Jane's eyes are half-open, and hers are too, meeting in the space between kisses that never quite seem to end, but there must be space, because there’s room for harsh breaths and quiet sounds that must be getting out somewhere, escaping in the rising heat between them.

When Claire’s thumb brushes the curve of Jane’s breast, barely comprehending the hint of scratchy lace and yielding warmth beneath, Jane hums against her lips. Her mouth drags down across Claire’s lower lip, pressing kisses along the line of her jaw. Claire’s chin rises instinctively, eyes closed, leaving room for Jane to continue along her throat, until the sensation of teeth dragging against her pulse point has them opening again with an indrawn breath, and the harsh glow of the track light suddenly pierces the mindless haze of pent-up longing that still has her clutching Jane’s hand at her side like she’d lose her if she let go.

At the sudden tension in Claire’s frame, Jane pauses, pressing the softest kiss to Claire’s exposed shoulder before drawing back, meeting her eyes again.

For a moment, Claire can’t form words, marveling at Jane’s easy smile and intuitive concern and the somehow still charming disarray of that summer-like hair.

“Not here,” she finally manages, her thumb still wandering up and down against the skin of Jane’s side like her hand has decided it’s going to live there, no matter what Claire’s restraint is asking it to do. “It’s almost time for the shift change—the guards—”

Jane nods. She draws their joined fingers up to her lips, kisses the back of Claire’s knuckles, and leans in for one more quick kiss. “Glad someone’s still thinking,” she says, not a little breathless.

And Claire finds herself in the strange position of being led by the hand up the White House lawn, towards her own home.

There’s no hesitation left as she follows.


	6. A Chapter Without Reservations

Inside, the ease of their first kiss feels twice as threatened by the trappings of responsibility around them as it had by the threat of being caught by the guards. It’s dark, quiet, but Claire knows, even at this hour, they’re hardly the only ones here. Uneasily, Claire extends the offer from before—a glass of wine, a guest bedroom. Jane just laughs. She kisses her again, in the hallway, on the first floor, beneath a portrait Claire doesn’t have time to catalog beyond a glimpse of judging eyes and the heavy gray eyebrows of a former someone—a president, a general, a dead old man—and the weight of history feels lighter with Jane in her arms.

 “Jane Davis,” Claire gasps when she pulls back. “I’m starting to think you _want_ to get caught.”

 Jane grins, a little guiltily, but just a little. “As much fun as it would be to entertain a voyeuristic guard or deeply traumatize our dear friend Mark, there are other things a whole lot further up my list of wants right now.”

 

Claire smiles, and it’s a little bit like a smirk, but just a little. “What kind of things?” she murmurs, sliding both palms under Jane’s blouse again, first-floor dangers be damned.

And god help her, Jane shivers and leans in, and the little hum in the back of her throat as her eyes close goes straight between Claire’s legs, makes her want to finish this here, now. This feeling—this kind of want—she hasn’t felt it in… years, if ever. There have been moments of desire, dalliances, the easy rush of giving in to a forbidden pursuit or pursuing the forbidden but this…

“I want to see you,” Jane breaths, and Claire feels every word up and down the whole length of her spine. Delicate fingers trail down her bare arms, waking her skin. “I want to touch you,” she adds, as though she isn’t already doing just that. Jane’s fingers finish the journey to Claire’s wrists and find hers beneath her own shirt. She draws them apart, wrapping them around her back until they’re pressed fully together, legs intertwined. "And I want to make you happy." 

“Is that all?” Claire murmurs, aiming for light, teasing, but knowing Jane will hear the warmth she feels in her voice.

“Hmm, no.” Her smile suddenly has an edge, an edge that reminds Claire of the time Jane stood in her office, calmly telling her she should figure out how to take advantage of her. She leans in until Claire can feel her lips on the shell of her ear. She has one breath to marvel at the easy give-and-take between them, how many times the tables have turned in the span of just a handful of kisses, how easily Jane relinquishes and reclaims control, before Jane’s words leave her next breath caught in her throat. “I’d love to see you touch yourself.”

It’s so light, so low, so matter-of-fact, and Claire feels her mouth stall, half-open. As Jane pulls back, setting them face-to-face again, Claire licks her lips, swallowing thickly. Jane’s eyes on her have sudden life, intent and heavy against her skin. It’s so incredibly _Jane_ , to pull a startling pronouncement out of left field, leaving an adversary off-balance, scrambling and, in this case, freed from the confines of a conference room, incredibly turned on.

“I don’t, really.” The honesty escapes her without permission, as though her earlier reluctant dance with truth was enough to leave her disarmed of artifice all night. “Not often, anyway.”

Jane’s eyebrows lift along with one side of her lips. “You know, I’m not surprised.” Claire feels warm palms on her hips, straying backwards, teasingly light. “I would guess you’re very, very good at making yourself fall to pieces, and that’s not something you’re comfortable with.” It isn't a question, and she doesn’t give Claire a chance to respond, cupping her face and leaning in for another kiss. It’s so light, quick, and teasing that Claire chases after it as she draws away, hands sliding up Jane’s back so she can pull her in by the shoulders; so she can claim the deeper kiss she wants.

So she can’t give in to the temptation to admit that it isn’t her own hands she’s uncomfortable with on her body, but the eyes that follow, the too-intimate invitation it seems to extend to the ones watching, an invitation less obvious when she’s wrapped up in someone else’s pleasure instead.

And Jane lets her kiss the thought away, lets Claire’s tongue behind her teeth, Claire’s teeth against her lips, Claire’s lips soothing the heat she leaves behind. As her hands clutch at Jane’s shoulders, Claire marvels mindlessly at the easy strength of the slight figure in her arms. Jane Davis is a small woman, but she kisses like she’s as tall as the White House, drinks in Claire’s pleasure like she knows she was put on earth to kiss and be kissed by the president.

But when Claire finally lets go, Jane is only Jane again, her distracting, disarming Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade, flushed and swaying less than a hall’s length away from the main foyer. Her eyes are half-closed, and she stumbles slightly as she takes a half step back. “You know,” she murmurs, “it’s been a long time since someone stole my knees out from under me with a kiss. These floors really are terrible for heels. You should do something about that, and I should be on a bed.”

It’s both less and more romantic than her earlier list of wants, and Claire laughs, reaching up to rub a smudge of Jane’s lipstick she can feel at the corner of her own mouth. “Come on,” she says, extending a hand. It's her turn to lead. 

As they start up the steps, Claire contemplates her companion. “How long?”

“Hmm?”

“Since you were so caught up in a kiss it made you complain about the White House floors.”

Jane chuckles. “Oh, you’re the first one for that, guaranteed. Are you trying to ask how long I’ve been single, or how old I am?”

Claire inclines her head, offering an apologetic smile at her own transparency. “I know, it isn’t polite to ask, but... the latter. I don’t think I’ve ever known you to celebrate a birthday.”

Jane eyes her side-long. “Probably a bit older than you think.”

Claire pauses on the top stair, turning while Jane is still a step below her. She trails her right hand through Jane’s hair, capturing one curl, fingering it idly between thumb and forefinger. She’s caught again by just how warm Jane’s shade of blond is, summery and inviting. _Amber waves of grain,_ her mind hums. _The color of America that made painters paint and poets sing._ Like nothing her own carefully focus-grouped white-gold could achieve. “You must only have five years on me.”

“Closer to ten.”

“Less than a decade, then.”

Jane sighs, stepping up, setting them eye-to-eye again. The urgency from below has faded; something quieter, contemplative, but still charged now hangs in the air. “A decade is no small thing.”

“No,” Claire admits. “But we’re both through half our lives. What difference does a decade make between us, now.”

Jane reaches out, tracing her first finger along Claire’s bottom lip. “You asked.”

“Only out of curiosity.” Impulsively, she kisses the tip of Jane’s finger. “You’re still… a mystery to me.”

Jane’s smile is back, as teasing and devious as before. “You don’t like that you can’t just pull a personnel file on me, do you.”

“No, I don’t.”

Jane laughs, leaning in to kiss away Claire’s tiny frown with the gentlest brush of lips. “You can ask me anything you want.”

“And you’ll answer?” Claire presses. “Whatever deadly top-secret intelligence role you were hidden away in that made you invisible for twenty-three years after Aspen?”

“So you _have_ been reading my file.”

Claire doesn’t dignify the teasing with a response. Of course she has. Since Frances, no one has been in a better position to destroy her. She’s read everything about Jane she could get her hands on. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much.

Jane steps in again, taking one of Claire’s hands in each of hers, clasping them down by their sides as she kisses Claire’s temple, her cheek, her jaw. Claire doesn’t move, waiting for an answer even as her skin tingles and warms beneath each feather-light touch. Finally, she pulls back enough to look into Claire’s eyes. “Trust, remember?” She leans close again, lips against lips. “I _know_ you feel it now.” 

Claire lets silence stretch, but, damn her, she does. She does trust her, has trusted her with her life, with her presidency, with her husband’s undoing, her secrets. Most of her greatest burdens and all of her greatest triumphs. And trust isn’t a prerequisite for this, for the kiss she’s pressing against Jane’s lips again, for the taste of desire thick on her tongue and the heat in the pit of her stomach, but it is a prerequisite for something else, something she’s only had with one other person, something she thought she lost forever when he broke it, and swore she would never try to find again.

And she’s not ready, not ready to put words to it, not ready to make decisions or confront emotions or do anything more than pull Jane closer, pull her down the hallway and into her bedroom, pin her against the door and fight with the buttons on her blouse until she finds an irresistible constellation of freckles to kiss one by one, but she might be, someday, if Jane stays, if Jane keeps knotting her hands in her hair like that, keeps making those little sounds in her low, breathless voice that send sparks down her spine, keeps reminding Claire that she doesn’t need to be alone to be on top of the world.

She’s kneeling before she realizes how fast she’s gotten here, her lips against the soft curve of Jane’s stomach, just above the clasp of her slacks. Staring up the line of Jane’s body, she stills, drinking in the open blouse, the crooked bra, one strap pushed halfway down one shoulder, one dark nipple—exactly the color of Jane’s freckles—exposed to the air, hard and faintly glistening from the attentions of Claire’s tongue. Her eyes skate higher, the rapid rise and fall of Jane’s chest, the faint redness on one side of her throat where Claire’s lips and teeth have gotten a bit… enthusiastic. And Jane’s eyes, open and dark and a little bit startled, as though she isn’t quite sure how they’ve gotten from a few words about trust to this state of half-dressed disarray, either.

“Okay,” Claire whispers against her stomach, gathering herself, trying to think clearly again. “Okay.” She stands, takes each side of Jane’s blouse in her hands and draws them together, resting her palms on her stomach, though the bemused smile on Jane’s lips as she does so doesn’t help her distraction. “As much as I appreciate that you have me acting as if I’m twenty again…” She pulls back, putting at least six inches between them. “…I’m not. And I am in desperate need of a shower.”

Jane’s hands slide without warning beneath the hem of her tank top, gliding across her stomach. “Mmm. Are not.”

Claire smiles, gently extricating the wandering hands. “I had a long, muggy run. You’re clean and beautiful.” She can see the protest die on Jane’s lips at the compliment, sees a charming, unexpected flush rise on her cheeks, darkening despite her already heightened color from their actions just seconds ago. “Give me just a moment.”

With a sigh, Jane does. She kicks off one heel—the only one, Claire realizes, that made it into the room—and paces coolly towards the bed. She sits, blouse undone, staring up at Claire with that calm, knowing smile that Claire thinks she has probably always wanted to kiss right off her face. “I’ll be waiting.”

As though freed from a spell, Claire shakes off her stillness. She leaves her tennis shoes by the door and pads across the carpet on bare feet, pushing open the bathroom door with a last glance over her shoulder. She washes her hands in the sink, staring into her own eyes, wide and bright and happier than she’s seen them in a long time. She can hear Jane in the bedroom behind her, wandering the space, until she turns on the shower.

She rinses quickly. The shower is necessary, but it isn’t the main reason she left the bedroom. Once clean, she wraps herself in a white robe. She glances up, lips parted, about to speak, but she hears Jane’s footsteps again, closer.

When the door opens, she’s running a comb through her hair, and Jane glides up behind her, taking advantage of the return to their usual difference in height to rise on tip-toe and press a quick kiss to the base of Claire’s neck. She smiles. The warmth of Jane's lips on her skin puts the shower to shame. She lets her head fall to the side, lets Jane press another kiss just behind her ear, then turns to brush their lips together. “One more minute,” she requests softly.

Jane hums against her cheek, then nods and steps away. Claire’s eyes follow as Jane wanders back into the bedroom, wanting to keep her close, but lingering by the sink as Jane disappears around the corner towards the bed. She licks her lips and runs a hand through her hair, pulling it back from her forehead, settling instantly into something slick and poised and professional, despite the bathrobe, despite the smudge of lipstick now running up the side of her throat.

She stares ahead—not into the eyes of her reflection, not into the semi-dark of her waiting bedroom, just… there. She keeps her voice low, constrained to this room and these ears—these eyes—only, but there is no mistaking the cold command in her words as she quietly demands something she has never asked on any other night, with any other lover.

“Don’t watch.”

The words brook no argument, and maybe the air shivers a little, steam drifting on eddies of unexpected denial, but when Claire closes the bathroom door, she enters her bedroom alone.


End file.
